Three thousand years before King Tut’s body was brushed with embalming oils and wrapped in linen to rest in a gold-filled tomb, prehistoric Egyptians seeking immortality may have experimented with their own recipes to preserve the dead for the afterlife.
It’s becoming increasingly obvious that as we spend more time communicating via social media, we are disappearing into bubbles. We receive information from the same sources and witness the views of the same people in our personalised newsfeeds every day. But it also seems like living in our bubble is having an effect on our own opinions and how we formulate them.
Bioengineers have created three-dimensional brain-like tissue that functions like and has structural features similar to tissue in the rat brain and that can be kept alive in the lab for more than two months.
Researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies have conducted experiments on mice to find possible solutions for dementia (mice typically succumb to Alzheimer’s symptoms within a year of birth). They discovered that a daily dose of fisetin, a flavanol found in strawberries, mangos, cucumbers, and other fruit and vegetables, successfully arrested the progressive loss of memory and other deleterious symptoms associated with learning. The research was published in the journal Aging Cell.
A plastic sponge that sops up the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide (CO2) might ease our tranisition away from polluting fossil fuels to new energy sources like hydrogen. A relative of food container plastics could play a role in President Obama’s plan to cut CO2 emissions. The material might also someday be integrated into power plant smokestacks.